There is a sales skill that you probably aren’t very good at. And I’ve got data to back this up.
The lack of this skill is a problem for you because in sales no cash exchanges hands until a person says “yes”.
And people are all a little crazy…
We all think that we're rational but we're not.
And so, even when the right offer, at the right price is put in front of prospects, they still pass on it. Which is dumb but it’s the world that we live in.
So what sales skill is required to help buyers make the right purchasing decisions? Well, that’s the skill of influence and it might be the most important and underrated sales skill in 2025.
If you listen in for the next 10 minutes, I’m going to explain how I know you probably lack the skill of influence and how it’s the one skill that is becoming more and more important to sellers who want to find and close enough deals, to make enough cash to retire early.
Now, my name is Will and I’m the founder of Salesman.com. At Salesman.com we have an assessment that nearly 40,000 sellers have completed.
The SalesCode assessment asks 120 questions and then provides insights on the traits of high performance that the user has and is lacking:
Last week I pulled all the SalesCode data, formatted it in a new way that I haven't experimented with before and something became clear.
The trait of “influence” was much lower than I expected in the sellers who have completed the assessment.
It was so low in fact that I compared the data between 2025 and the first version of the assessment that we launched back in 2019 and the results were shocking.
87% of sellers who regularly exceeded sales quota scored high for influence back in 2019.
Only 35% of sellers who regularly exceeded sales quota scored high for influence in 2025.
So, has the social skill of ethically influencing buyers become less important over the past 6 years?
I don't think so.
Heck, in the Trust Crisis that we're currently selling into where everyone is more sceptical than ever, the ability to influence prospects and help them see the world from our perspective is more powerful than ever.
So, what is going on here?
I think from hiding behind email, attempting (and failing) to get deals done over social media and working from home has led a whole generation of sellers to deskill their ability to influence others.
That is the current state of affairs. Buyers are more sceptical of sellers than ever before and sellers are worse then ever at influencing buyers.
What does this mean for you?
It means that if you can learn the skill of influence then you have a massive competitive advantage in the marketplace.
Remember, influence is the ability to convince someone to believe something new or different to what they currently believe.
If your prospects believed that:
Then you wouldn't have a job. You could be instantly replaced by an online order form.
But your job exists…
So inherently there is a need for you to influence your buyers to change their views and adopt your perspective to get deals over the line.
So lets now take a look at 3 ways that you can dramatically increase your ability to influence your prospects today.
Once a prospect agrees that in theory our product can help them, they’re much more likely to continue to agree this as we increase the scope of our point of view over time.
Here’s why.
Humans don’t like to change our minds. Back in our tribal days, if we made a decision that didn’t harm us (or better yet, benefited us), we weren’t going to question making that decision the next time around. We’d automatically do it again without critically thinking through it.
This bias towards commitment is how our brains reduce their daily cognitive load. By choosing the path of least resistance, we conserve our energy so we can spend it more efficiently on new problems that we face.
And believe it or not, the same principle applies to sales. If you can get your buyer to agree with you (even on small matters), then they’re much more likely to keep on agreeing with you throughout the rest of the buying process.
The best way to leverage the influence technique of commitment is to use “micro-closes” throughout the sales process.
Each time the buyer says yes to a micro-close, they positively reinforce the point of view that they’ve committed to.
So the first step to using micro-closing when influencing buyers is to position something that they almost certainly believe in.
For example, when I’m selling Salesman.com Academy to sales leadership I ask “is it fair to say that there’s room for improvement with the team?”
The answer is undoubtedly “yes” and so once they agree to that slither of my point of view, I can continue influencing them to agree to the broader strokes that my training program is the correct decision for their business.
We all want the stuff that is hard to get.
That super attractive partner. That limited edition Rolex. Whatever it is. When it’s in high demand, it becomes more desirable.
Like the other influence techniques, the appeal of scarce items goes back 10,000 years to innate biological and evolutionary desires that all humans are deeply wired with.
Back then, the most scarce resources were food and shelter. If you acquired these resources you survived, otherwise you died.
So, our brain values scarce resources as if our lives depend on them. The thing is though, in modern society, most of our basic needs are met. Our caveman brains are too stupid to realise this however.
Our brains still put life or death levels of focus into acquiring the scarce resources found in modern society.
That is why there is rampant desire for material objects, when it makes little sense to crave them. For example, you can’t eat or get a comfortable night’s sleep in a Hermes handbag or Ferrari yet we still crave them.
The interesting thing is that we can engineer the same kind of lust for our products by increasing the levels of scarcity around them.
Think of it like this, for complex B2B product, typically buyers want to work with sellers who are oversubscribed. They want to meet with the best of the best. And they want to buy from people who have clients jam-packed in their pipeline.
The example I always use is that if you find out you have cancer, you don’t want to visit the doctor with zero patients. No, you want to be checked over by the doctor who can just barely squeeze you in this week because he’s so damn successful.
For sellers, the best way to appeal to this scarcity bias is by appropriately valuing your time.
This takes some repositing on your end but you need to change your mindset. You are not a pesky salesperson trying to con and trick your way into a deal. You are a consultant. You are an expert. You are a deal-maker—so start acting like one!
High level, high self-esteem individuals should value their time. You need to communicate this with your prospects so you become a person they aspire to work with rather than the 47th seller that has sent them a crappy semi AI generated cold email begging for a meeting that morning.
Which then leads us onto the most powerful way to influence a prospect in 2025 and that is to have authority.
Humans wouldn’t have gotten anywhere without social hierarchy. There have always been experts who knew more than others on a subject. And we have turned to them for advice, guidance, and reassurance.
Authorities—are the individuals whose opinions hold more sway than everyone else, and who spur more action, too.
For instance, if I got a call from Warren Buffet about changing my investment strategy, you’d better believe I’d listen. But if I received a call from a deadbeat friend who dropped out of high school and still lives with his dad, I’d be less likely to take his investing advice seriously.
Authority matters. And if you appear more authoritative, you can influence your buyers.
Building authority in the internet age is so easy that I really can’t understand why more sellers don’t lean into it.
The barrier to authority for salespeople is so low that doing those things over the course of a couple of months is more than enough to become known as a top expert in your field.
You need to develop the skill of influence, but it is only one part of the puzzle here. There are a couple of other things you need to work on if you are to become a predictable quota crushing professional.
When you implement an effective sales process and you take on the mindset of a winner, then you know what to do and you've become the person capable of doing it.
The only other skill you need is the ability to influence other people to take the action they need to leap from where they are right now, to where they want to be.
Stack these three skills together and you instantly become unstoppable in sales.